


Thunder of the Drums

by inheritedjeans



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s05e13 The Diamond of the Day, Future Fic, Gen, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 12:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1226752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inheritedjeans/pseuds/inheritedjeans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Albion's time of need, King Arthur Pendragon was to return. But coming back from the dead isn't as easy as he could have hoped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thunder of the Drums

**Author's Note:**

> For the kmm prompt: "Coming back from the dead isn't as easy as they'd have hoped." This has been sitting on my hard-drive for too long. Whoops.

1.

_You are the Once and Future King, Arthur._

Water rocks a boat and a million shades of the same ancient voice flutter around the swirl of his half consciousness.

_Your Once has passed and now you must wait for your time of Future to arrive._

He beats against the damp press of flesh around him, rubbery webbing tangled through the skeins of who he _is_ and trapping him inside a place of blood and over wood and under the glare of yellow flame high above. He beats and twists, because his time has passed, until he hears the shuddering breath of someone standing over him. Someone pressing cold fingertips to the boney shell of his prison and saying nothing but goodbye. Goodbye means time to go, and so he waits with a strange tilt of sadness -- a thing he thought was finally over for him -- as he listens to a fading rush that could be wind but for the human hum underlying it. Grief, he thinks. This is grief that he listens to; another thing he thought was over. It tastes strange and heavy as it filters through the trappings of mortality and rubs against his very being. Grief, he is sure, will not be a thing he misses, though he knows not where he is going. 

Something shifts and something rocks and a voice says, “In sebbe gerest,” over and above him and then he is free.

Gold shimmers and he is weightless, he is walking in a meadow and swimming through a pool filled with a verdant summer swell, and he is happy as he pads across a beach of soft white sand, making little pools wherever he plants his feet. The ocean stretches pale green -- a strange colour for an ocean, yet perfect all the same -- and clear all the way to the horizon. When he turns his head away, he sees a sun-dappled forest of young birch and ancient yew bending soft with the wind, moss deep around their roots and saying, _This is your time of rest; this is your time of peace. Come here and forget, for a time. Come here and be at peace with those you love._

Arthur sits, relishing the ease of his breathing now that he is free of the iron bands of kingship that had tightened so harshly around his chest in the past few (hundred?) years. The ocean breeze softens the skin around his face that had grown prematurely wrinkled with worry, and he thinks that in a while, he will stand up. In maybe a little while, he will walk into the forest and he will greet his mother with a kiss and his fallen knights with a crushing hug. But not yet. 

Not just yet.

Carried on the breeze, he can still hear the faint sound of Merlin's voice, come all the way through to the Otherworld, and he isn't ready to concede that just now.

In a moment. In a moment. Just one more moment for him to listen.

On the horizon, the sun stretches its setting all the way through to eternity: an endless wash of gold over hazy, twilit shores.

2.

Damp moss squelches between Arthur's toes as he runs through the forest, Elyan fast gaining and Lancelot fleet ahead of him. The sun is bright and morning-fresh and, somewhere close, Arthur knows his mother is waiting. Just a little further.

Somewhere behind him, past Elyan and beyond the sunset shores, he remembers (briefly, loosely) that someone else is waiting for him, too. But that is from years past and forever in the future, and Arthur is busy forgetting everything that happened in that place of earth and cold and aching pain.

Bark flakes under the twist of his fingers as he swings half around a young birch, head spinning and breath whooshing into his lungs in a rush, in his turn to catch up with Lancelot. He ducks under the red sweep of his discarded cloak as he flings it away. Camelot red, Arthur thinks.

But what is Camelot? Something from that time long ago, to be sure, and probably best left alone for awhile.

Arthur catches up with Lancelot just around a jut of rocks that border a spring-cool rush of mountains, and they stop as Elyan crashes against their backs.

"Gwaine's catching up," he says. "Let's wait."

They wait, steady and still.

3.

The winding path up through the mountains breathes clean air and whistles thinly with every gasp of wind between its jagged, rocky teeth.

“Just a little further,” Arthur says. “I can -- it’s just a little further.”

But none out of the four of them are tired. Their hearts beat strong again and their lungs draw breath with sure swiftness as they climb, steady, without even the memory of fatigue that would have plagued them in another world. Their legs move with strength and surety, solid and exhilarating, as they climb and climb and climb. Here, they are strong. Here, they are healthy and hale, air sliding smooth down their throats, and if any of them remember that time from long ago when moving hurt and breathing felt sharp as swords, none mention anything of it.

“Just a little further,” Arthur says.

The path winds through clean air and through to clear sky, closer to the clouds and chasing the sun. Around a twist, over a crop of split rock, they find it: a still lake hidden in the bowl of the mountains, clear through to the bottom and cold and sweet under the blue of the sky.

And she is there, standing alone on the rough, stony beach and waiting, toes curling into the lip of the water, hair a blonde cascade over her shoulder. She turns to them and smiles. She turns to them and says, “You’ve found us.” She turns to Elyan and Lancelot and Gwaine and says, “They’re waiting for you. They’ve been waiting so long. Go, go and find them,” she says, pointing her limned-with-summer arm at the wall of mountain on the other side of the lake.

Only it isn’t just a mountainside at all -- in it are carved pillars and vast, framed doorways and so many windows that they can see light bending into the many rooms that lie beyond. At the mountain’s plateaued top stand a dozen tiered balconies, hanging with greenery and draping flowers that lie sweet against the sheer face of the mountain palace.

Gwaine and Lancelot and Elyan take off, splashing through the shallows of the lake as they skirt around to the palace, but Arthur stays.

“Mother,” he says. “Mother.”

“Arthur. Come here, come here.”

Arthur kisses his mother’s cheek and smiles when she hugs him, firm and steady, and if they have ever met before -- have they? No, of course not -- this meeting is more an introduction than a preface to goodbye.

The sun stays sweet and gentle in the sky, straight up, neither rising nor setting. 

4.

The first time he hears the call, feels it toll through his bones and resonate in his marrow, he is floating on his back in the middle of the lake that sinks for leagues and tastes like morning dew and slides like silk over his skin.

 _arthur arthur ARTHUR,_ it comes, fluttering around him with all the soft urgency of a flapping moth’s wings against the closed fingers of a child’s cupped hands. _i need you need you NEED YOU._

Thunder claps overhead, a _BOOM_ that has Arthur slapping against the water in shock before pulling himself to shore, stroke after hurried, frantic stroke, because there have never been clouds in this sky before now, ever, and slithering through the cracks threaded by the lightning in the sky come the whispers, loud as a war drum. 

_arthur arthur arthur now now NOW._

Lightning lances the sky in twain, shattering the deep dark of thundercloud and evening blue -- Arthur doesn’t know if the sun has set for the first and maybe final time or if the storm will pass and leave them again in peace -- and making way for a glut of images. They spread like a full-set high table feast, opulent and rotting with excess, over the mountain tops wherever Arthur turns his head. Rain bleeds through the cascading crack over the bowl of the lake, thick and red, from a vision of war.

Oh, Arthur thinks. I had forgotten war. But now I remember.

He will never forget again.

 _arthur arthur ARTHUR HELP HELP_ HELP!

And, oh, Arthur thinks, I had forgotten that voice. But I never will forget it again.

Horsemen, thousands strong, charge headlong. Under their hooves sparks the crackle of lightning, small spiderwebs bright in their multitude, and they bear thunder drummed loud in a storm between their legs. Their riders bear gonfalons -- a two headed eagle splayed large over a blue background, the familiar sigil of Mercia -- and some carry short swords in their upraised fists; others, long spears with sharp-edged points. Blood splashes up thick from the ground and their teeth gnash, thirsty for more.

Arthur can feel his mouth opening, hand trying to clasp around the hilt of a sword he had left behind long ago and an eternity away, and he turns, trying to find an end to the hoard and finding instead -- 

\-- Merlin, with eyes wide and desperate and burning a furious gold from beneath a midnight-dark cowl. His cloak peels away from his wiry body, braced around his shoulders and at his elbows and at the clasp fastened to the right of his breastbone. (The clasp -- the sigil of Arthur’s mother’s house -- pulls Arthur’s throat tight together.) Lines of weaving tattoos curl around his wrists and disappear under the billow of his red sleeves; curl over the bony jut of his ankles and slide up underneath the cuff of his black trousers. (Bare feet, skin yellow-white with the cold -- Arthur could have told him, should have long ago, that his bare feet were going to get him killed as easily as an enemy’s sword if he cut himself on metal fixed with the curse of spine-snapping muscle spasms, or if he flinched from a prickle under his foot into the swinging path of a flail.) In one hand he holds a stave of simply-carved pale wood tipped with a small globe of black stone. His other hand clenches desperately around a flickering wreath of flame. At his back stands a legion of men, but Arthur can see easily what the problem is: they are scattered, some horsed and some gathered together behind a small group of pikemen, but none of them look to their leader, if they have one. None follow any orders save those given by their own fear.

Arthur thinks of his surprise as Merlin spread his fingers and pulled the sparks from their campfire tight together into the form of a dragon midflight. Arthur thinks of all the years Merlin had worked to his own ends -- which somehow equated exactly to Arthur’s and Camelot’s -- in secret, in the shadows, alone and unaided and safely unabetted. Maybe, in the years since Arthur had left the middle earth, Merlin never bothered to learn the singular beauty of working twain and tandem with another soul -- and if he never bothered with that, how would he have learned the art of command?

 _help help help help,_ and here, for the first time, rather than crescendo, the tolling roll of pounding whispers begins to fade. _it’s time it’s time it’stime it’stimeitstimeits --_

The front of horsemen bursts through the shoddy dam of pikemen and the flame held in Merlin’s fist stills, freezes, reforms into a pale green spear of twisting ice that he raises and flings into the throat of the nearest cavalryman. Blood flies messy into the air, rains down onto Arthur’s upturned face, but he can’t look away; can’t stop watching as Merlin uses the same motion from the sweep of his spear-arm to swing his staff level with the ground.

Merlin snarls, vicious and scared and so angry, and the crystal begins to burn and glow the deep, dark red of a dragon’s flame-thick throat and -- 

\-- the scene pops with ear-aching pressure.

It takes Arthur a moment to react at all, as the clouds begin to boil over the horizon, down below the jagged teeth of the mountain. The blue of the sky and the pale yellow of a noon-day sun sit quiet in the vision’s wake. 

_The noon-day forever sun,_ says a different voice entirely, deep and and timeless as the stars; as ancient as the land. Albion, Arthur thinks. She is Albion. _Forget, Arthur. Forget and be at peace; forget forgetforget_ \-- NO.

That echoing voice that slithers wanton through his mind snaps. A quiet sits in Arthur’s ears in its stead, a fuzzy warmth that chills him to the bone because the vision broke and what does that mean and why must he forget?

Perhaps it means that the person who called to him -- Merlin -- has fallen. Perhaps it means that his kinsmen have been slain. Perhaps he must forget because his call is not needed anymore.

Arthur runs along the beach. Beneath his feet, smooth stones shift and fresh grass bends and, when he sways beyond the lake’s edge in his hurry, water splashes out and up over his ankles. Thoughts of gathering his knights and storming over the brink of the Otherworld -- the hows and wheres for the moment disregarded -- slide thick in his mind. The mountain palace, claimed by his knights for their final rest and waiting for Arthur to join them, sits at Arthur’s right, but when he turns his head, it blurs before his eyes. Sheets of slate slide over the windows and the doors, smashing them shut with raucous violence. A gloom hovers like a crown over its turrets and he can no longer make out the hanging greenery against the grey.

_They are of Avalon forever now, in a way you will not be for an age upon another age, Pendragon King._

Fine. Arthur will scale the walls of the Otherworld alone, as he has so rarely been before.

_They don’t need you. Not like they will, Arthur. Not as much as they will. It is not your time not your timenotyourtime._

Shale breaks around Arthur’s fingers and tears his skin as he pulls himself up the mountainside, callouses having softened away after his eternity of quiescence. Vines twist around his forearms, tugging him back and down until he wrenches away, breaking them against the cutting sharpness of a jut of rock. His fingers ache as he pulls himself up, higher and higher, chasing the last dwindle of cloud that had borne his homeland’s face.

(Had he never noticed before, truly, how like a prison this bowl of a lake is? Or had he been simply persuaded to forget?)

Blood tickles down his arms and air burns unclean in the tired lengths of his lungs because, _You should forget, Arthur. This is not the time we send you back. Later, later, later._ But Arthur has seen the face of War and Invasion, and he has seen what it does to the leaderless. (Has slain them, as a child: the Druids in their grove, scattered, defenseless, the retreat that may have saved them not even attempted in favour of their blind panic.) So he climbs, slower than the clouds vanish beyond the mountains and slower than the thudding of hooves fades from his ears, because it might not be the intended time of his return, but this is the time he chooses.

He climbs, feet slipping in his own blood -- bare feet had become habitual in this place of indulgent rest -- and exhaustion prematurely shaking through his limbs, slackening their efforts until all that keeps pulling him up and up and up is Arthur’s desperation to find his people again; to save Merlin from his fate of impotent leadership. Fingers wrap around the top of a spire of stone and Arthur gasps and trembles as he pulls himself up and over, out of the valley of the lake and away from his mother and his brethren and the peace of irresponsibility.

The horizon bleeds grey before his eyes, resting atop the dull green of an endless forest. Too late.

 _Come home, Arthur. Come home come home comehomeandwaitforyourtime._ But as Arthur turns, a furious growl ready to spill from his throat and acceptance already calming his adrenaline-fueled limbs, he slips -- slick red of blood underfoot, congealed into a slippery mess -- and he falls backwards. Falls away (grey of the sky wheeling around him) from the warm glow of Avalon. Just as he hits the ground, he hears, _NO, it’s not your time; we will to send you back but it’s NOT YOUR TIME,_ and he feels the connection between him and the world held inside that bowl of a valley snap.

The stretch of Arthur’s lungs, struggling to breathe as he lies on his back and stares up at the sky, pulls deep in his chest and there’s an ache in his ribs where he could once feel the warmth of Albion. Clouds, dark and devoid of imagery, spill through the sky and scrawl rain over the forest. Arthur shivers, listless, and waits until his clothes have been soaked against his skin before stretching and fighting his way to his feet. The sound of drums echoes from deep within the Forest of Morning and it calls to him with Merlin’s voice. _Come and see,_ it says, and so Arthur goes. The forest is wide and endless and somewhere within it or perhaps somewhere beyond it, Arthur will find his way home.

Pine needles prickle underfoot and the wind slices through the sodden fabric of his Camelot-red cloak.

5.

The sun sits steady overhead at noon before Arthur realizes that it’s been moving at all. Time slips strange between the trees, dragging and lurching until he isn’t sure how long he’s been wandering. And yet still he wanders, searching for the forest’s edge, striving to reach that endless beach of sunsets that borders this Otherworld and separates him from Camelot. There’s a voice that he recognizes floating on the breeze. There’s a voice, quiet and endless as the life of the sun and deeper than the ocean’s deepest wellspring, and it calls him onward in a faint whisper pulsing through the air almost more quietly than his own heartbeat. But the forest is still as death and if he strains, he can hear it; try to follow it.

That voice is Albion herself, though quieter now than she had been when he still slept in Avalon. She wishes as much as he that he return to Camelot. But Arthur has lost his way in the woods -- no matter which way he turns, no matter how often he twists and tries to find his way _out_ , he finds himself ever in the middle of a boundless swathe of trees. He is turning in circles or trapped in a magic stronger than his own will, for though his journey from the beach (where the sun was always setting) to the bowl of a valley (where the lake shone through clear to a thousand different worlds and where he could feel Albion strumming through his veins) was a journey of perhaps hours, he fears he has now been wandering for hundreds of years trying to trace his steps back the other way.

Hundreds of years -- enough time for the endless stretch of this Otherworld dawn to slacken into afternoon? 

_arthurarthurarthur follow here follow this, come closer come now, there is yet time there is time,_ she says. A rare phrase of coherency, though useless. Follow, she says, though she speaks from within him more often than not. A directionless sense of muted urgency.

Albion sits in the corner of his mind, when she isn’t hiding in the breeze, and she is muffled near to silence and often reduced to a gentle flutter that makes Arthur flinch, unsettled. She should have a weight within him, he thinks, that she does not. She is the airy flutter of a sparrow’s wings, the shiver of summer-sunned rain, the brush of tall grass tickling the bare skin of his calves. Yellowed leaves -- and when had this happened, this yawning stretch of autumn chilling the trees towards decay? -- stick to the calloused skin of his feet, dampened as they are from drinking the stormwater pooled along the ground. The sun sits on the midday line of early afternoon, shortening the shadows of the trees, when the flutter tucked inside the base of his skull begins to quicken, urgent and abrasive, a scrub of pine needles over his mind.

She tugs, ineffectual but urgent, the squalling of a child or the pull of a toddler’s hand at Arthur’s own, the beat of a prisoner’s hands against the bars of its jail. She pulls -- Arthur stumbles, hand slamming into the trunk of a tree, rough bark shearing down the skin of his palm -- and screams through the the muffle in Arthur's mind ( _nownowNOW GOBACK GOBACK GOBACK_ ) with all the blunt force of a war hammer. He crumples, weighted with all the will of Albion, ribs squeezing together, pressing the air from his lungs and breaking bones that haven’t been so much as bruised since his last stand at Camlann on the River Wye. Pressure grasps his skull so tightly that he half-expects to feel a crunching slide of bone under his fingers as he presses his hands to his temples and strangles a scream in his the back of his throat.

 _COME AND SEE,_ and a vision slams against Arthur’s mind. Dimly, he feels his back hit the ground. When he stands again -- a numbness lifting the weight from his back and threading resolve through his bones, pulling strength to the fore where Arthur had feared there was none left to find -- he is in another world.

The table of a peace treaty is a familiar sight, but in this Arthur sees something unfamiliar: his own dragon crest, the crest of Camelot and all Albion, resting in the position of the entreating. Men dressed in the red of Camelot, gold dragon elegantly laid over their breasts, stand unsure and regretful as they cluster together behind one man whom Arthur cannot recall having ever seen and whose features Arthur can’t place as belonging to any royal family he knows. In his hands a slim quill shakes as he drags it across a piece of parchment, sagging loops and jagged edges signing underneath a block of dense writing. A man resting in a casual position of power upon the throne, which is set low on a shallow dais but looms imposingly all the same, has a rich beard and a face lined deeply with satisfaction as he watches the signing. He sets his chin on one propped up hand, elbow steady on the arm of his throne, and a lazy smile slides over his face. Behind the throne hangs a banner, rich with blue and stitched with a gold cross, small falcons sitting in each of the four corners. A foreign flag, and one Arthur cannot recall ever having seen. 

As soon as it is done, the parchment signed and dated, the man upon the throne says, “There, now. That was not so difficult after all, was it? And here you have fought us for so long, under your tyrannical Rhodri’s reign. But worry not, now that he is dead. You need no longer suffer the life of the leaderless. I believe the life of a Wessex vassal shall serve you Northmen quite well.” The man -- a Wessex lord, Arthur supposes -- pauses for a moment to sneer before saying, “Pity you never managed to hold to your unity. Selfish infighting while the Danish horde banks along your shores? Pathetic. King Alfred will hold you together much better than you ever could.” (The men, Arthur’s men, those bearing the crest of Camelot and under the banner of the North, shake with their indignation but say nothing.) “Guards, please see these vassals to the edge of town.”

Arthur reaches for his sword -- long since lost to him, though sometimes he thought he could see its reflection in the depths of Avalon -- with one arm and throws out his other to brace his balance. Instinct, and a helpless one, now: the men of Camelot pass through him without even a shiver. But Arthur, he breaks, shatters, scatters into dust and feels the pieces of himself blow apart into the wind, the wind that sends him back, back, back to that yellowing Forest of Morning --

\-- _YOU MUST GO BACK. THIS IS YOUR TIME AND YOU MUST GO BACK._

The words suck at the insides of Arthur’s skull, at the clench of his gut and the shivering mess of his tired legs, trying to pull him back, but -- a door slams shut within him and the channel between this Forever Wood and the world of Arthur’s home breaks. The sound of Arthur’s gasping blooms through the air and he aches and bleeds alone in a forest lit by the steady fade of dusk. Arthur shudders a shaky breath into his lungs and blinks the blood out of his eyes. When he stands, he feels the slither of the blood that had pooled in the shells of his ears as it slides down his neck, tracing the thudding in his throat.

He doesn’t hear it, the voice loam deep and as wide as the forever span of the oceans. She has left him.

6.

Silence crushes the forest under its weight, but the visions still burst out loud and brash. They swarm over him with a steady regularity, pulling him headlong into a world that can no longer accept him. The second time it happens, it’s a vision of slaughter: men on horseback -- gonfalons flapping above them bearing two lions passant, one atop the other, stitched over a deep red background -- running wild through a field thick with screaming. Arthur cannot recognize any of the banners, or the people, but the sickness flowing sluggish through his veins is enough to tell him that these are his people, and they are dying in a raid purposed solely for their culling.

Desperation and the metal-strong thrash of Albion’s need punches him through from this Otherworld to the living land, throwing Arthur deep into the dark waters of a lake, a spear lancing through the easy parting of the water. His first desperate shout bellows the last of the air from his lungs and he panics, thrashing against the cloak wrapping around him like a funeral shroud, sinking under the weight of his chainmail.

Above his head, a fan of light unfolds -- sunlight, so far above him that though he fights, hands clawing at the water, trying to pull himself up, he will never reach it. Exhaustion sets into his bones, creaking between his joints and slowing his movements until Arthur twitches helplessly, chest convulsing against the water pressing against him. Arthur sinks deeper and deeper until the darkness swallows the last whisper of sunlight he could see.

The itching grasp he has on his life dims and the weight against his chest grows until his throat tightens spastically and his mouth opens --

\-- the water burns as it corrodes its way into his lungs and he dies, the taste of iron and panic and the metal of lakewater strangling the back of his throat.

7.

Silence buzzes in a flood through his ears. Arthur coughs, panics and thrashes against the moss because --

\-- the wretched suck of water through his lungs, the iron bands of pressure squeezing the air through his throat and out --

but no. He can breathe again.

The sun reclines into its setting and light burns the path before Arthur’s feet as he wanders. The trees surrounding him stand tall in the still air, branches spreading in eerie symmetry and shedding leaves that fall straight down from clutching twig to bed of moss. It is not real. This is not his Great Beyond, nor is it his path to his homeward reunion. This is the wasting land, barren for all its greenery.

Arthur wanders, alone, and waits to be forced into the middle earth once more. Perhaps next time, Merlin will be waiting to pull him from the waters. Perhaps next time, Arthur will be allowed to stay.  
\--.


End file.
